How to Master SLAB Climbing

Love it or hate it, slab climbing is good for your technique. It's going to improve your footwork, your commitment and your balance and all of these things are going to carry over into your other forms of climbing. Today we're going to talk about how to improve your slab climbing. Before we get into the exercises that you need to be doing to improve your slab climbing, we're first going to go through the mechanics of good slab technique. To start with, let's focus on smearing. Smearing is the act of applying a large amount of rubber to the surface you're climbing on. This can be on a flat surface or on a foothold as well. A mistake can be standing on the very tip of the shoe and on these friction-based surfaces, what can happen is the rubber can deform and skid off the hold, often leaving those rubber skid marks you see on the footholds. This is because the rubber of your shoe is soft and it's soft to deform to the holds but the negative of this is it can also lose that friction and rub off the hold if you don't have enough surface area in contact with it. Another tactic you can use to improving your smearing is actually your shoe choice and here is a good example of a good smearing shoe. It's very soft and it's got a very flat bottom. This means when we smear and we bend that toe or we drop the heel, you're very easily going to get that good surface area and it's going to deform to the holds that you're trying to smear on. Hip position is also really important to how we smear. Generally what we're trying to do is keep our hips above our feet when we're smearing. On very easy angled slabs, we can lose that friction if we lean too far into the wall or of course too far out from the wall. When the angle of slab gets really quite vertical and really difficult, we can simply think about just trying to bring our body weight as close to the wall as possible. This is because even the smallest lean outwards can be the tipping point of staying on or falling off. A great tip that can help you with this concept, especially when it comes to smearing on volumes, is actually moving your feet further away from the wall as you bring your hips closer in. So what this looks like is actually standing on the apex of the volume or the edge of the volume. This creates more space to get your hips into the wall. The next tactic that could really help with your slab climbing but perhaps doesn't come so intuitively is using your palms. Palming is a really great way to help with pushing down on holds or even bringing your feet up to hold when you've got a really high step. Momentum. While you might think this is reserved for competition climbing and overhangs, this is actually really useful on slab climbing. In many cases we have to move to a far away foot or up to a high rock over. Using a bit of momentum to bridge that gap and take you to that point of balance can be really helpful in gaining that hold. It's really important to have the strength and endurance in your calves and your feet if your project revolves around slab climbing. Another tactic that can really help with this is going for a more stiff shoe if your climb is very long. A pretty sneaky tactic to improving your endurance on slab climbs is actually using your heel to rest. This is one of the most passive positions you can use but of course you're going to need a fairly good foothold to be able to place your heel on it. Commitment is a massive mental barrier to slab climbing. I know a lot of people which are pretty scared of slab climbing, including myself, but you just need to expand your comfort zone when it comes to doing these scarier slab moves. Commitment is going to come with time spent on the wall and expanding your comfort zone. The last one is trusting your intuition when it comes to slab climbing. Often slab climbing is very nuanced and the smallest changes in body position and balance can be the difference between sending a move and not doing it. This is largely down to experience and time spent on slab climbing. We have Jen Wood with us here, a bit of a slab pro and Jen's going to talk us through how to train slabs and get better at slab climbing. So first up is a really good one for training commitment. This is one-handed and no-handed climbing. For this you might choose quite an easy slab boulder and try climbing it with just one hand. This is really good for generating momentum, commitment on footholds and getting used to that feeling of body awareness on a slab. To make this harder try it with no hands. So the next exercise is repeating slab boulders multiple times. This is really good for generating body awareness and consolidating the learning you've done on the slab. So for this you'll climb a slab boulder which may take you a couple of attempts but that's fine. You'll then repeat it two to three more times trying to refine the movement. This is especially good when you've only got a limited number of boulders on the slabs. So another really good option if you don't have that many boulders on your slab is to do a liminance on the existing climb or try and make up your own. This is a great one to do with friends. So to train the physical aspects of slab climbing there's some important things we can do off the wall as well such as training ankle flexibility and deep squat strength. Deep squats can also include cross-axe squats and pistol squats. These are really important when we've got a high step and we want to keep our hips close to the wall. For both these climbing sessions we recommend you spend at least 10 to 15 minutes working on these slab routines. This can be done at the beginning of the session to really help build awareness and commitment for harder slab climbs or before moving on to other things in your training. For your ankle flexibility we recommend you do a straight leg standing calf stretch as well as a kneeling calf stretch. If you're doing this in your warm-up do a fairly light 30 to 60 second stretch in both of these variations. If you're doing this in your training or after your session you can go somewhere between 60-90 seconds and make that stretch a fair bit more intense. When doing squats like cross-axe squats or pistol squats try and work in a rep range of somewhere between four and six reps to build that strength. It's a good idea to also do these movements or exercises in your warm-up to help potentiate that strength but keep it fairly light intensity and use assistance if needed to keep it easy. This has been the fundamentals of slab climbing. Please go check out the other episodes in this fundamental series. Don't forget to like and subscribe and we'll see you next time!